So, what is urban sprawl?
Pat Helland at Microsoft wrote an interesting piece on the parallels between urban development and IT development. The metaphor is a bit stretched in places (applications are buildings?) but it makes some sense overall.
The biggest difference between the two that I see is that cities grew organically with no real direction or control except that of economic and social imperative, while IT infrastructures grow under the supervision of managers. Sure, there is an amount of chaos in the on going evolution of a large IT infrastructure, but this is nothing compared to the evolution of a large city like New York or London at the end of the 19th century.